JOIN US FOR GIS DAY AT NOTRE DAME
Learn to harness the power of geospatial data.
On Monday, November 12, 2018, join Notre Dame as we celebrate GIS Day. This annual salute to geospatial technology and its power to transform and better our lives and the lives of those around us will include workshops, lunch and lightning presentations. GIS Day will take place at Hesburgh Library.
Notre Dame GIS Specialists & Co-Organizers
Milan Budhathoki
Milan Budhathoki is the GIS Specialist for the CRC. He has a lab, ND-GAL (Geospatial Analysis Laboratory), at Innovation Park. GAL is established in the Center for Research Computing (CRC) in collaboration with the (Environmental Change Initiative (ECI) to connect the Notre Dame community with Geospatial services. Milan provides technical input to geospatial data users. He is specialized in GIS analysis, spatial data management, web GIS and server applications, and remotely sensed data processing. He is also a certified FAA Part 107 remote pilot and fly sUAS (small Unmanned Aerial System) for research related aerial photography. For more information about the GAL visit: gis.crc.nd.edu.
Matthew Sisk
Matthew Sisk is the GIS Librarian in the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship. He received his Ph.D. in Paleolithic Archaeology from Stony Brook University in 2011 and has worked extensively in GIS-based archaeology and ecological modeling. Some of Matthew’s current research is focused on assessing the spatial scale of urban lead exposure. In the CDS, his primary role is to assist Notre Dame students and faculty with general GIS questions, satellite imagery analysis, workflow automation, coding and data curation. He also teaches a series of workshops and a credit bearing course on these topics.
GIS Resources on Campus
WORKSHOPS & TALKS
9:30am — 10:30am What in the World is GIS?
Presented by: Matthew Sisk, GIS and Anthropology Librarian
Location: 220 Hesburgh Library, Collaboration Hub
GIS is a system of hardware and software for the storage, retrieval, mapping and analysis of geographic data. It provides a system for organizing spatial and related information into a single analytical framework and is used in a variety of academic and industry settings for understanding spatial relationships. This workshop will address the question "What is GIS?", provide a variety of examples, and present the resources available in the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship.
10:30am — 11:30am ArcGIS Online
Presented by: Milan Budhathoki, GIS Specialist
Location: 220 Hesburgh Library, Collaboration Hub
ArcGIS Online is a cloud-based collaborative platform for web GIS application. Users can discover and share geographic data as well as create interactive maps and applications without any prior knowledge of web programming. In this workshop, participants will explore the functionality of ArcGIS Online like: displaying geographic data, creating interactive maps and applications, and performing basic spatial analysis on spatial data. More information about ArcGIS Online can be found here: ArcGIS Online.
1:00pm — 2:00pm Lightning Talks
Location: 231 Hesburgh Library
Suzanna Krivulskaya, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History
“Mapping Ministerial Elopers: Using GIS and R Shiny to Track Runaway Protestant Pastors, 1870-1914”
Between 1870 and 1914, at least 266 Protestant pastors eloped from their homes and pulpits with women who were not their wives. Relying on a database of their cases documented in newspaper columns, this project builds an interactive map of these elopements. It tracks the movement of runaway ministers and lets users filter by year, denomination, and direction, thereby demonstrating how a digital humanities approach to this cohort reveals patterns that isolated text-based studies might obscure.
Samuel Alptekin, Senior, College of Engineering
“Spatial Cybercrimes”
Google is a company built on data. They track search preferences, ad clicks, and, for Android phones, location. Enabling ‘location data’ is practically a requirement to use a phone in this day and age. This feature enables map apps to accurately route you to your destination and search engines to display spatially relevant information to you. However, behind the scenes on Android phones, Google is recording every data point it takes of your location. Thankfully, this data is made available to users through Google Takeout - a service Google offers where Google
Account Owners can download the information Google has associated with their account. By making use of this Location History.json file provided by Google Takeout, we can plot the geographic locations of users and make use of the timestamps associated with each data point
to effectively show exactly where a person was at any given time. We are developing a tool to make use of this data in order to corroborate stories of witnesses and suspects in order to uphold the law.
Adam Heet, Digital Projects Specialist, Hesburgh Libraries
“Creating a 3D Map of Notre Dame Campus”
Shuyue Li, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Biological Sciences
“Seagrass Mapping and Human Impact Evaluation Using Remote Sensing Imagery at Core Banks, NC”
Seagrass can provide key ecological service to coastal areas, yet is experiencing significant decline worldwide, mainly due to coastal human population pressures. This project focuses on influence of boating recognized by propeller scars. The goal of this project is to explore the methods for seagrass mapping based on both drone and satellite remote sensing imagery, and evaluate the impact on seagrass from boat propellers using ultrahigh-resolution drone imagery. By analyzing ultrahigh-resolution images surveyed over Core Banks, NC, the results have proved a successful application of Object-Based Classification in classifying drone images of submerged habitats; human activities have lasting effects on seagrass habitat, since seagrass in scar-affected regions has greater rate of both growth and decline. The results also show that propeller scars found in areas with higher density of seagrass are more likely to recover, although this conclusion need further confirmation with on-the- ground species composition data. Based on high-resolution satellite imagery, automated seagrass mapping is feasible through simple thresholding of computed ReGNDVI (Red Edge-Green-NDVI) images. This founding has potential for large-area seagrass mapping, and might be useful for conservation of
coastal areas.
Amir Said Siraj, Postdoctoral Researcher, Environmental Change Initiative
“Geographic Time-Series: Computational Methods in GIS”
Gopal Penny, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences, Environmental Change Initiative
“Using surface water bodies to investigate the mechanisms of hydrological change”
Water resources are being strained in much of the world, especially in arid and semi arid climates and often in regions with limited observational records. While numerous remote-sensing techniques continue to emerge to describe various components of the water balance (e.g., precipitation, soil moisture, groundwater), often these methods lack the precision and spatial resolution to characterize small and medium watersheds. Surface water bodies present an opportunity to observe present and historical hydrology, and supplemented with additional data sets (hydrological, environmental, social), can lead to insights regarding the mechanisms of hydrological change. In this talk I will briefly describe the use surface water bodies, including wetlands and man-made lakes, to understand the physical processes and drivers of dramatic declines in streamflow in two rivers in India, the Arkavathy and the upper Jhelum.
Sisi Meng, Visiting Faculty, Keough School of Global Affairs
“Household Preferences for Sea Level Rise Adaptation Plan in Florida”
2:00pm — 3:00pm Spotlight Talk
Milan Budhathoki, GIS Specialist, Center for Social Science Research, Center for Research Computing, Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship, Environmental Change Initiative
“Prioritizing neighborhoods in Chicago that could benefit from green roof to reduce urban heat stress”
This spotlight talk will focus on finding possible neighborhoods in the City of Chicago to implement green roof to mitigate urban heat stress. The team is composed of Notre Dame research staff, faculty and researchers form other institutions. The team deployed an interdisciplinary approach including GIS to spot high priority neighborhoods in Chicago who can benefit from green roof.
